@Andathar wrote:
Incorrect it has nothing to do with is version. All OS's will be limited to 2tb IF it's a 32bit OS vs a 64bit OS. Even Windows 11 32 bit (if it exists)
No, the 2TB drive size limit is not due to 32-bit vs 64-bit OS. It's a limit of the MBR partition table (and the FAT32 filesystem), which has long been solved by GPT and modern filesystems (or previously by LVM / Veritas Volume Manager). Modern IDE/ATA drives use LBA48 addressing, which is 48-bit addresses to blocks. Originally, blocks were 512 bytes, so a theoretical limit of 128 petabytes per drive. Drive vendors and operating systems are moving towards 4096 bytes blocks, raising that limit to 1 exabyte per drive. MBR is limited 512 byte block drives to 2TB due to having 32 bit block addresses in the partition table, and GPT has raised that limit to 18 exabytes. NTFS used to be limited to 256TB, but more recent versions of Windows raised that to 8 petabytes, and ReFS (the replacement for NTFS on large volumes) has a limit of 35 exabytes.
There should be no issues running currently available drive sizes on 32 bit Windows, although 32 bit is rapidly approaching end of support life so I'd strongly advise using a 64 bit system for large scale data storage. Even large RAID arrays which present many drives as one should be fine. Functionally, there is no drive or filesystem size limit today, unless you have server infrastructure which rivals companies like Facebook and Google.
